Big History—Humans in the Cosmos Lecture 48
Agriculture appeared about 10,000 or 11,000 years ago. Before the appearance of agriculture, all human beings were foragers.
I
f asked (perhaps around a camp¿re) to explain how everything got to be the way it is, how might we respond? Let’s begin with human history. We live in the largest and most complex human community ever created. Six billion humans, often in conÀict with each other, are linked through trade, travel, and modern forms of communications into a single global community. This community was created in just a few hundred years. About 300 years ago, human beings crossed a sort of threshold as human societies became more interconnected and began to innovate faster than ever before. For 5,000 years before this, most people had lived in the large, powerful communities we call “Agrarian civilizations.” They had cities with magni¿cent architecture and powerful rulers sustained by large populations of peasants who produced most of society’s resources. Innovation was slower, so history moved more slowly, and there were fewer people than today. Two thousand years ago, there were about 250 million people on Earth. The ¿rst Agrarian civilizations appeared in regions such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. During the previous 5,000 years, humans had increasingly lived in small peasant villages governed by local chiefs. Yet many still lived by foraging, gathering what they needed as they migrated through their home territories. The appearance of agriculture, just over 10,000 years ago, counts as a fundamental historical threshold because agriculture increased the amount of resources humans could extract from a given area. By doing so, it stimulated population growth and innovation and laid the foundations for the ¿rst Agrarian civilizations. In the preceding 200,000 to 300,000 years, all humans had lived as foragers, in nomadic, family-sized communities. Slowly, they spread through Africa and around the world. For most of this time, humans were only slightly more numerous than our close relatives, the great apes, are today. Our species, Homo sapiens, appeared about 200,000 to 300,000 years ago somewhere in 223
